Twitter Delays Upgrade to Bring Iran Demonstrations

Twitter has delayed important maintenance in order to keep acting as a conduit for information out of Iran on the election protests.

Twitter was supposed to shut down for about 90 minutes to perform a critical network upgrade, but that’s been delayed, according to a blog announcement by company head Biz Stone.

The microblogging site has become a vital conduit to the outside world for those protesting the results of elections in Iran. Along with Facebook and Flickr, it’s currently blocked in the country, but tech-savvy young Iranians have been able to get Tweets out using proxies. Information on the protests is sent via #iranelection.

Twitter thought it better to delay the upgrade, during which time the site would have been unavailable, and keep channels open. Twitter has become an important source of citizen journalism.

Although Stone didn’t say so, other reports have stated that the US government asked Twitter to delay the work to allow the flow of information to remain uninterrupted. No one has confirmed that, however.